The medals are still weighing heavy around the necks of Bermuda?s athletes and plans are already underway for the trip to Rhodes in 2007.

Bermuda, sleeping on cruise ships and competing in the wind and rain, took home more than 40 medals from the Games in Shetland, not to mention three golds from Gibraltar, and the spirit of the Games has been declared well and truly alive.

?It has been a fantastic competition for us,? said Bermuda?s Island Games committee chairman Jon Beard.

?I can?t praise the athletes enough for what they have achieved on and off the field. It is always pleasing to win as many medals as we have but it is also important that we are making progress in other sports and the exposure we got from these Games can only help us.

?There has been a great spirit among the team which was fantastic to see with athletes using all their spare time to go and support other competitors from the Island.

?I?ve said all along that these Games are a great yardstick for us to see where we are and having seen us compete in Shetland and Gibraltar, I absolutely standby that.

?For younger athletes this has been a great experience, maybe the first steps on the road to further international success, and for the more seasoned competitors, a chance to show where they stand against like-on-like competitors, and I think we have shown we are very strong.?

Bermuda?s relatively lowly position of fourth in the medal table was somewhat misleading, a result of not sending a big swim team nor any track and field competitors, something Beard is keen to see rectified when the Games shift to the Greek Island in two years? time.

Due to the lack of facilities on Rhodes, at least three sports are going to be switched to an alternative venue ? as happened to tennis and basketball to Gibraltar this year ? with gymnastics, squash and badminton the victims this time.

The loss of the gymnasts, who will compete in the Faroe Islands instead, who gleaned more than half of Bermuda?s haul, will mean medals will have to come from another source.

?What cost us a lot this time was the lack of athletes and swimmers,? said Beard.

?If you look at the times and distances from the track and field, Bermuda would have been done very well if we had sent this time, very well indeed. And in the pool, a lot of our guys are going to the world championships in Montreal instead so we didn?t have the same number of medals as last time.

?If we send a strong team again in 2007, we can expect to be somewhere near the top of the Rhodes medal table even without the 30-odd podium finishes the gymnasts would get us.?

The squash and badminton teams, who are provisionally scheduled to compete in Guernsey, will also miss out on the party in Rhodes and therefore will miss out on the very essence of the Games.

?What makes it such a superb event is the closeness of the teams and the competition,? continued Beard, who, along with men?s national assistant football coach Paul Scope, was forced to climb the podium in the absence of the airport-bound women?s football team to collect their medals and souvenir Shetland ponies.

?Real friends are made against the backdrop of fierce sporting competition, it?s a mini-Olympics with a fantastic atmosphere.

?And I?m pleased to say that when all the tracksuit-swapping went on at the end, it was the Bermuda gear that was the most sought after.

?Some of our stuff was being swapped three-to-one, yet another thing our organisers got right.

?On that subject I would like to say a big thank-you to Jon Gazzard, our full-time administrator, who did a marvellous job in getting everything in place to make sure it all went smoothly for our athletes.

?Our only problems were a bit of missing luggage although we can?t blame him for that.

?All in all it was a fantastically-organised event and a wonderful thing for Bermuda sport.?